Adam Matthew Collections

Includes rare manuscript and early printed material, illustrated maps and documents, diaries and ships' logs. Covers the earliest voyages of Vasco da Gama, the opening of trade with the Spice Islands, the colonization of the Americas and Australasia, the search for the Northwest and Northeast Passages, and finally the race for the Poles.

The Grand Tour was a rite-of-passage for many aristocratic and wealthy young men of the eighteenth century: a phenomenon which shaped the creative and intellectual sensibilities of some of the eighteenth century’s greatest artists, writers and thinkers. These accounts of the English abroad, c.1550-1850, highlight the influence of continental travel on British art, architecture, urban planning, literature and philosophy.

The Grand Tour includes the travel writings and works of some of Britain’s artists, writers and thinkers, revealing how interaction with European culture shaped their creative and intellectual sensibilities. It also includes many writings by forgotten or anonymous travelers, including many women, whose daily experiences offer an insight into the experience and practicalities of travel over the centuries.

The material covers popular trends such as phrenology, herbal medicine and hydrotherapy, and documents the rise of widespread advertising by commercial manufacturers of medical aids. Materials have an emphasis on ephemera and advertising, aimed at the ordinary man in the street rather than medical professionals. These popular practices were built upon the earlier traditions of folk medicine and materia medica as dispensed by apothecaries, and help to show the relationships and differences between traditional old-style medicine and newly emerging scientific methods.